There is bound to be consternation throughout the Bradford district at the news that a £1.2 million cut in the education budget is under consideration. Bradford has enough problems already, as revealed in its poor showing in the league tables, without having to be further handicapped by a reduction in the resources available to tackle the various factors which have helped to bring this situation about.

It is some small comfort that if the cuts go ahead, they are likely to be to central services rather than to the resources made directly available to individual schools. But there is still bound to be concern at those proposed cuts, particularly as one of them is to the Schools Library Service, which is threatened with having £34,000 sliced off its £94,000 budget.

That is bound to lead to a reduction in the pool of books available to schools in a city which has a record of literacy problems. That would be bad news for the youngsters who need all the access to reading material that they can get, and for Bradford employers who need a literate schools population from which to recruit their future workforces.

It would also be terrible PR for any city to be seen to be slashing its school libraries budget during National Year of Reading, when efforts are supposed to be intensified throughout the country to bring children and books together.

Schools are already under-resourced as regards the quantity of books available to them. All this will do is make the situation much worse.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.